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The number of COVID cases has declined, as have hospitalizations since January in the Bay Area. But the reason you still hear so much conflicting information is that there aren’t enough people vaccinated yet to let their guard down, hospitalizations seem to have stopped dropping steadily, and things remain scary in the upper Midwest and the North-east.
Hospitalizations for severe COVID cases have shown signs of stabilizing in the Bay Area over the past week, with slight increases even occurring on certain days and in some counties. We don’t see the kind of worrying surge in the cases we see in Michigan, New Jersey and elsewhere, but we still can’t be sure we’re in the clear and people really need to keep their masks on.
UCSF infectious disease expert Dr Monica Gandhi said earlier this week that the CDC director’s warnings of “impending disaster” across the country were “a bit alarmist,” and certainly in the news. bay area, she says we have less to fear.
“I’m really not worried,” Gandhi told ABC 7. “I actually feel really upbeat and upbeat that we’re headed in the right direction.”
But today we have more sadness from Santa Clara County health officials who report that there are many confirmed variant cases in the county. As of March 27, they said, there were 92 confirmed cases of B.1.1.7 (the British variant), three confirmed cases of B.1.351 (the South African variant), one case of P.1 (the Brazilian variant) and over 1,000 confirmed cases of B.1.427 and B.1.429 (two variants first detected in California).
“Genomic sequencing allows us to confirm what we already assumed based on national trends, namely the presence and the unfortunate increase of variants in our community,” said Dr. Sara Cody, Health Officer of Santa Clara. , during a press conference, by KRON4. “We are already seeing outbreaks in other parts of the country, probably attributable to variants. Combined with the data we are seeing locally, these are important warning signs that we must continue to minimize the spread. We can still prevent an outbreak from happening here if we stick to our proven prevention measures for a little longer while we increase our vaccination rates. “
“The numbers are going up, and right now we’re in a race between the variants and the vaccine,” Cody said.
Dr Martin Fenstersheib, the county’s testing and vaccine manager, reiterated the comments and said he expected 80% of the county’s adults to be vaccinated by August, as reported by KPIX. “Please be patient, please protect yourself as we don’t want the variants to cause a problem with people who have not yet been vaccinated or develop additional variants,” Fenstersheib said. “The more the virus is allowed to replicate, the more chances there are for additional mutations and variants.”
On the SFist Bay Area COVID Info page, we’ve been tracking COVID hospitalizations since the summer flare-up last year. Hospitalized cases increased on four different days last week, although the trajectory has generally been downward. There are now as many COVID patients in Bay Area hospitals as there were in late October and early November, before the winter surge, and about as many as there were at the start of the surge. summer at the end of June.
As of March 30, there were 406 COVID patients in Bay Area hospitals, up from 680 on March 1.
Daily new cases in San Francisco were on average 37 last week and 26 the week before, but so far this week they are on average around 32 per day.
In Santa Clara County, the seven-day average of new daily cases was 108 yesterday, down from 110 a week earlier and 125 two weeks earlier.
The Bay Area has seen a cumulative total of 422,300 cases to date since last March, at the time of writing.
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